Turn Out The Ballpark's Lights -- Baseball Is Dead

Nearly 50 years ago, the French-American historian Jacques Barzun wrote a book about the United States, God's Country and Mine, from which one sentence has been repeatedly quoted.

"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America," Barzun observed, "had better learn baseball, its rules and realities.''

For the ensuing half-century, Barzun's notion that baseball was woven inextricably into the living cultural and intellectual fabric of the United States has stood as conventional wisdom.

After all, even while U.S. servicemen and women were dying in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt it was important that major league baseball continue because "these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20 million of their fellow citizens."

While their fellow citizens now look at most of the players less as recreational assets than as money-grubbing brats with the social consciousness of cockroaches, the idea that baseball still is vibrant and important remains widely held. That is why the notion of another baseball strike is ostensibly antithetical to the American way of life -- you know, mom, apple pie and baseball.

The truth is that another baseball strike will only enlarge the irreparable hole in the spot the sport once filled in the American tapestry.

The truth is baseball already is dead, and the causes are multiple.

The games last too long for the MTV-Ritalin generation. Even well-played, close games lose their tension because pitchers are allowed to take so much time between pitches.

Baseball's showcase, the World Series, begins so late kids can't watch. What parent of an elementary-school kid wants to let a child start watching a game he or she won't be able to finish because it routinely runs well past midnight on the East Coast?

Ratings for the past four World Series are, respectively, the third, first, fourth and second lowest ever. From 1968 through 1980, the World Series routinely attracted more than a 50 percent share of those watching TV; the past four years, the shares were between 21 and 24 percent.

The economic high times of the 1990s, which produced temporarily alluring new stadiums to attract fans, are over.

The relatively high attendance figures in many cities are a form of Potemkin Village. Both leagues now give attendance figures as tickets sold, not turnstile counts. In Denver and Los Angeles, announced crowds of 30,000 routinely include barely 20,000 people.

"The great baseball boom of the 1990s was not because of the economic boom but because of our generation. We poured our affluence into baseball," counters Jules Tygiel, 53, professor of history at San Francisco State University and author of Past Time: Baseball as History.

"In the short-term, baseball is relatively healthy," Tygiel said before he left for a Giants' game recently. "Ask me if baseball will be in trouble in 20 years (when the baby-boom generation no longer is filling ballparks), and I would definitely say, `Yes.' ''

The players' arrogance over the game's relevance, and their inflated view of their value to society has alienated even those once-passionate fans who don't care about how much money they make.

Listen to home-run king Barry Bonds, as quoted about the ongoing negotiations between the owners and players in the June 22 Washington Post: "It's not my fault you don't play baseball. It's not our fault you're not an actor or Bill Gates or anybody else. Nobody is complaining about their salaries, or the owners' salaries. So don't complain about ours. We have the right to make it."

A Colorado Rockies' season-ticket holder who watched his team's highest-paid pitcher, Mike Hampton, get shelled early in a recent game noticed an edge to the boos and the crowd's heckling of Hampton as he left the field. The reaction had gone from derisive to vindictive. One can soon imagine a crowd going from annoyed to angry, reacting to disillusionment the way the bloodthirsty mob does in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust:

"They have been cheated and betrayed,'' West wrote. "They have slaved and saved for nothing.''

The near certainty that many of baseball's recent slugging feats have been accomplished by players loaded with performance-enhancing drugs is particularly damaging to a sport where records are sacrosanct. This is, after all, the sport whose purists diminished Roger Maris' single-season home-run record with an asterisk because he played more games than Babe Ruth.